Goals for 0.4

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

So, what do we put in 0.4, and when do we release it?

First, I’d like to release 0.4 by (or on) GNU’s 30th birthday, which is
on Sep. 28th [0].  On the 28th, I’d also like to have a bootable QEMU
image built with Guix, featuring at least the init system (dmd), a
console login, and bare utilities.

What I would really like to see in 0.4:

  • Guix must be usable with the old Guile 2.0.5, since that’s what some
    distros provide.  At the GHM I realized that some people had weird
    bugs with that Guile, notably in the substituter.  I fixed a couple
    of bugs, but there may be others around.

    So, to 2.0.5 users: please run ‘make check’, use Guix and in
    particular the substituter, and report bugs!

  • Packages: as already discussed, more packages, anything that makes
    the distro more useful (having Git is a must.)
    A package a day keeps the competition away.  ;-)

  • Core updates: in particular libc 2.18.  Possibly switch to GCC 4.8
    as the default compiler.

  • APIs: new or extended APIs for building stand-alone images.  I’ve
    been looking into that recently, notably with the initrd stuff.

  • New ‘--list-generations’ and ‘--delete-generations’ options for
    ‘guix package’.

  • Manual: improve as we see fit; notably add a section on font usage
    for X applications.

Optional goals:

  • MIPS64/N64 support: the bootstrap tarballs are now all available
    through cross-compilation from x86_64, so it’s “just” a matter of
    feeding them in bootstrap.scm and trying out.

  • Rebuilt bootstrap binaries (aka. the “Fixed Point Project”, more on
    that later.)

  • Python 3, and related packaging changes.

Anything else?

What do people think?

Ludo’.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/gnu30/

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